Most of the news media accounts reflecting on Mayor Daniel Lurie’s first year in office are upbeat, some bordering on hagiographic: San Francisco is back. The city is turning around. The mayor has cut regulations and made life easier for businesses.
The reality on the ground is a bit different.
I have often said that if you divide the city into quintiles—the richest 20 percent to the poorest 20 percent—boom times are generally terrible for the bottom four.
The rich get richer during booms, because investment money pours in, high-paid jobs and stock options expand, the financial industry makes money, and everyone who owns a lot of real estate can cash in.
But the lowest 20 percent—and even the three quintiles in the middle—suffer, because booms drive up the cost of living and don’t drive up wages for anyone but the top 20 percent.
Lurie is celebrating and promoting the AI-driven tech boom, which is helping fill some office buildings downtown (thus making money for the already rich owners of commercial property).
But it’s also driven up residential rents by 17 percent in just one year. That’s a killer for anyone in the lower 80 percent (unless they already own homes or are protected by rent control).
Lurie’s solution, which he calls the “Family Zoning Plan,” does nothing, absolutely nothing, to address this problem. The mayor, trusting the private market (as billionaires tend to do), had pushed through changes that allow taller, denser housing over much of the city. Those rules have not spurred developers to build much, and anything they build will be aimed only at the top 20 percent.
Meanwhile, funding for affordable housing faces cuts.
In fact, most services, other than cops, that help the people in the lower two or three quintiles are getting cut, often brutally. Instead, Lurie wants to cut taxes for big developers.
Evictions are rising. Muni fares are rising.
Lurie’s popularity remains high, according to polling data. Let me suggest a reason for that: As Calvin Welch likes to say, “who lives here, votes here.” Under former Mayor London Breed and Mayor Daniel Lurie, people who were in the lower two quintiles have been forced out of town. Richer people have moved in.
Lurie has been great for the rich, and they support him.
When he moves to an austerity budget, opposes taxes on the rich, and crime goes up because violence prevention and anti-poverty programs vanish, and services the remaining working-class San Franciscans rely on disappear, and the only winners are the top 20 percent, who can’t even get a table at a restaurant because the servers and cooks have been forced out of town, those poll numbers may start to change.
